The penultimate weekend’s campaigning was frenetic at the Lib Dems’ Eastleigh HQ…

Over 530 Lib Dem volunteers passed through its doors in just this weekend (to add to the 1,000+ who’d visited in the previous week). Visitors included an upbeat Nick Clegg (BBC report and video here) and others — as this video shows:

Tory Eastleigh candidate angers doctors with state school comment (The Guardian)
The Conservatives have been forced on to the defensive in Eastleigh byelection campaign after doctors signed a letter condemning its candidate for suggesting the local state schools were not good enough for her son who wanted to become a surgeon.

And the Tory campaign wasn’t helped much either by some rather over-assiduous centralised instructions from Tory HQ:

Tory Twitter ‘lemmings’ backfire with Eastleigh byelection message: Spate of identical tweets on housing policy bring accusations that Tories still grappling with subtleties of digital campaigning (The Guardian)
After a bumpy start to their byelection campaign, which saw their candidate claim state schools were not good enough for her son, it appeared the Tory party was back “on message” with a vengeance in Eastleigh on Sunday. A spate of statements from party activists and MPs, including Robert Halfon and Nadhim Zahawi, appeared on Twitter just before 2pm attacking the Liberal Democrats over housing policy. Each tweet was identical – “The Lib Dem Eastleigh campaign in turmoil as Party’s candidate admitted he ‘voted for’ 5,000 new houses on green spaces” – and the social networking site was soon abuzz with users claiming the episode was orchestrated from Tory central command and proof that some in the party were still struggling with the subtleties of campaigning in the digital age.

Labour’s O’Farell haunted by old comments

As I’ve already said, I’m a big fan of John O’Farrell’s book Things Can Only Get Better, an honest and funny look at Labour’s 18 years in opposition. It and he are also deeply tribal, however, so it’s no surprise really that journalists have found parts which are wince-worthy:

Fury over ‘moral reprobate’ Labour candidate who wrote of disappointment that Mrs Thatcher didn’t die in the Brighton bomb (Daily Mail)
The Labour candidate in the crucial Eastleigh by-election said he wished Margaret Thatcher had been murdered in the IRA attack on Brighton’s Grand Hotel. Left-winger John O’Farrell felt a ‘surge of excitement’ when he heard of the attempted assassination in 1984 and was ‘disappointed’ the terrorists failed. He asked himself repeatedly: ‘Why did she have to leave the bathroom two minutes earlier?’ The bathroom of Lady Thatcher’s suite was wrecked in the explosion. She had been in it shortly before the bomb went off. The comments made by Mr O’Farrell, a comedian who wrote gags for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, appear in his book about his support for Labour, entitled Things Can Only Get Better.

Labour’s shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan defended Mr O’Farrell: “Some of it is in bad taste and should not have been said, but he was writing a book that was at the time, very funny, very witty.” Which is fair enough — we really don’t want a politics where no candidate is ever allowed to have said something offensive.